I was looking for a way to introduce a short delay after SGP changes the brightness level of the flat panel but before it takes the first flat. I didn’t see that anywhere but that doesn’t mean I didn’t miss it either.
I’m using a Spike-A Flat panel with the Alnitak Emulator. On occasion I’ve noticed that the first flat frame taken for a given filter is completely saturated (65535). The second frame is always fine. Of course, this doesn’t happen all the time or on every filter, but it happens often enough. My thought was maybe the panel occasionally needs 500ms or so after the brightness has changed to allow it to settle.
I’ve noted this, but currently there is no official way to do this. You can likely do it with a bit of sequence hackery (maybe… depends on the structure of your sequence). Instead of just the flat event you actually use, insert another flat event prior to it that will only capture 1 frame for some period of time equal to the time you need for the panel to stabilize. In the suffix field for that fake “delay event”, enter something like “fake” or “garbage” so it’s apparent that resultant file can just be discarded.
Yeah, something like that would work as a hack if it doesn’t make sense for other reasons to add a delay parameter in a flat event (no idea how widespread this is… I suspect not very since I don’t recall seeing questions about it before). I already have the Suffix used in the directory structure, so putting “JUNK” in there would send the delay event results to somewhere easily identifiable. Thanks for the idea.